A Spare Life (16 page)

On May 6, 1991, the lead news story was a broadcast video of the murder in Split of SaÅ¡o GeÅ¡kovski, a Yugoslav National Army soldier from Kavadarci. He was killed before everyone's eyes, mowed down by a Croatian Army bullet. GeÅ¡kovski was the first official casualty of the Yugoslav conflict. That night, someone kept calling our phone. Srebra and I answered, but all we heard on the other end of the line was a strange rumbling sound. Someone was apparently dialing the wrong number, and we heard our parents in the big room saying, “Someone got our number somehow, and now they're pestering us.” The ringing stopped. SaÅ¡o GeÅ¡kovski had died; Yugoslavia collapsed. For the first time, Macedonia found itself affected by the events in Yugoslavia that had led to its collapse. Many people adopted an anti-Croatian, anti-Slovenian position, and in so doing, took the side of the Yugoslav National Army. They chose the side of Serbia and of Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević. This was just the beginning of an evil that we knew from our history textbooks was called war, but we had never thought it would happen in our lifetimes.

It wasn't long before we celebrated our graduation at the disco on the Kale fortress, but as usual, no one asked Srebra or me to dance. We hung out in a booth in the corner, waiting for the evening to end. Lala, dressed as usual in a black skirt and long black-fringed tee shirt, kept us company. She hugged us and said, “Now it's up to you to take charge of your lives. Know that I'm always here for you.” She took two hundred English pounds from her pocket and shoved them into my patent leather purse, saying, “To help get you to London.” Although both of us protested and wanted to give the money back right away, she said, “It's only a loan, that's all.” We didn't know what to say; we simply felt how much this young woman meant to us, how close she was to us. It was the first concrete step toward our lifelong dream, the first bit of capital that Srebra and I would save in our drawer, tucked into the almanac with the perpetual calendar. Those two hundred pounds, more than anything else, awoke in us the hope that we really would be separated one day, that a solution could be found for our conjoined heads. After that, for a long time, we did not see Lala. We thought she would now have new special students in her new class, so we felt uncomfortable seeking her out. We didn't go to London. The money rested in the perpetual calendar and waited for the fine sunny day that, as Lala had said, must surely come. In the meantime, we saw her on television from time to time, always modest and positive—she had developed an entire film school for young people. Several years later at the airport, as we set off on our fateful trip to London, fate wanted us to meet Lala again. She was waiting for a flight to Turkey. “I'm looking for sponsors to buy movie cameras,” she said. “The children need to shoot films. Good luck to you on the operation; I will see you later, separately, at Café Leptokaria.” With her two hundred pounds in our hand luggage, we saw her for the last time, and she us.

A difficult decision awaited us after graduation, when we were to submit applications to universities. Srebra said, “I gave in when we enrolled in high school, now you need to give way.” Over the years, I had sometimes thought about the day when we would need to choose a department, and knowing Srebra, I knew that she would say precisely this—that I needed to give in because she had given in and had allowed me to choose our high-school courses, but now we were facing the real decision: What should we study? We already knew other languages, and besides the general resistance Srebra felt toward the study of languages other than just learning enough to make ourselves understood, she didn't want to consider studying literature or languages, or anything like that. “No,” she said, “I've had enough of things that don't interest me. Yugoslavia is disintegrating, but you still want to study something for pleasure,” which is what she called those subjects. “Aren't you aware that you need to study something more specific, something important for society, and for the world? We'll study law, period,” she said. If there's anything I don't like to read, it's legal records and legislative documents, and if there's something I don't like to write, it's appeals, testimonies, requests, and other administrative texts. And now Srebra wanted us to study law! “If you don't want to study literature, why don't we study ethnology or psychology?” I said, attempting to offer a new suggestion. “Because all those disciplines are egotistical, directed toward the individual. They are only concerned with an individual's being, his soul, or his nationality, but law is a discipline about everyone, about humanity. Everyone is the same before the law; there is no subjectivity, there are no personal thoughts and desires but rules and laws that must be respected, regardless of whether the question concerns one person, an entire community, an entire nation, or the entire world.” We always spoke parallel to each other, because we couldn't look each other in the eye; our words disappeared as if carried off by the wind. I knew that Srebra was a good orator, and had, therefore, the foundation for being a lawyer, though I didn't know who would want a lawyer with the kind of physical deformity that Srebra and I had—to sit opposite not one, but two people, who were inseparable due to a bodily defect. For
me, this was all so distant, so foreign, that for the whole night after our conversation, I lay with eyes open, cursing my fate. In fateful moments, Roza always appeared to me, and I now envied her that she was dead. I wanted to die as well, so I wouldn't have to face this dreadful choice. I didn't know how I could study something I did not like, how the knowledge would even enter my head at all. I would likely fail the exams, I thought, and Srebra and I would have to withdraw, or at least I would have to withdraw and then stay physically present in the classes and exams waiting for Srebra to finish. “What do they need to get a degree for?” we once heard our father say to our mother, “What then? Even if they do graduate, how will they find work? Who will take them with their heads like that?” Surprisingly, this time our mother was the more sympathetic: “Oh come on, let them finish something. You never know, maybe someday they'll open their own law office and support themselves. Maybe they'll be the bosses and people will work for them, and they'll earn the money. It's different with schooling. Besides, what will they do without it? When we die, they'll be out on the street.” And in my private self-irony, I saw the name of our law office, “Two-Headed Star,” and inside, Srebra and I sat on a double-wide chair, meeting clients, who stared and didn't know whether to turn and leave or sit on the chair opposite. Some did run off as if they'd had their heads cut off, but others sat down, and we took their cases, and whenever we went to court, there was always a crowd in the courthouse. They came out of curiosity, wanting to see the two-headed lawyers. And there were always many journalists, and every legal case we conducted received publicity, and…all sorts of other things as well. It was decided without my being asked for consent: we handed in our documents for admission to the Faculty of Law. And we were accepted.

The lead story on the news the next day was that Slovenia had broken away from Yugoslavia and voted for independence, and the next story was that Croatia had done the same. “I told you,” said Srebra. “Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore.” “What do you mean? Yugoslavia can exist without them,” Dad said, but Mom's first comment was, “Oh no, poor Tomče! Who knows what he's up to? He'll never be able to return.” Tomče was one of her first cousins on her mother's side, our mother's youngest cousin, who as a child had gone to live with his uncles in Slovenia after his father died in a mining accident, and who now worked there. He had an apartment, money, but what was all that to him now that he couldn't return to Macedonia? Would the Slovenes permit him to leave, now that they had separated? She said she would call him the next day at his house in Jesenice, and she really did try to get him on the phone all day from work, but the lines were cut; she couldn't get a connection. Tomče became the primary topic of conversation at home, because he was our only tie with Slovenia, which had been attacked by the Yugoslav National Army. He was our only connection to the war that had begun as if it had fallen from the sky. It seemed to me that we only followed the news about the war in Slovenia because of our distant cousin left outside the borders of Yugoslavia, not a trace of whom remained; he hadn't been in contact with his brothers either, who remained in Macedonia and had quarreled over the house that was left to them when their mother died. Except for the times in his childhood when Tomče, who always wore a woven wristband, came to our grandmother's in the village to help with the reaping and haymaking, Srebra and I had only seen him once since he left for Slovenia—when he came to visit us and his other relatives in Macedonia. He was indeed a young man, the youngest of the relatives we called “Uncle.” He was very handsome, blond, nicely dressed, and he brought us a present: two wide umbrellas with long wooden handles and cords for carrying them over your shoulder. It seemed he had forgotten that our heads were attached and, logically, we could use only one umbrella, under which we always got wet down one arm and one leg. He was a bit upset that he had brought us two umbrellas, so he said he'd brought one for Verče, though he hadn't seen her since childhood. We were
delighted with the umbrellas; there was nothing like them in Skopje then. “They don't have them in Slovenia, either,” he said. “But every Saturday, I bike to Austria to go shopping.”

That was incomprehensible to us, going abroad on a bicycle, to Western Europe no less, where they had everything that was unavailable in Yugoslavia. “Maybe he fled to Austria on his bicycle,” said Srebra, but our mother worried about him and always talked about him, though prior to that she had spoken of him only when she got on the phone to ask about his life there: whether he had a girlfriend and when he would be coming to Macedonia. She would tell him about his brothers' arguments, how one had taken to drinking, how his mother was turning in her grave because of them, and that he was the only clever one in their family and should stay put where he was and not even think of returning to Macedonia. Let the brothers kill each other. But now, now that he was cut off from the world, she complained that he wasn't here: “You see? We're not fighting each other here, but they'll pluck each other's eyes out over there; people are going to die.” The war in Slovenia lasted a few days, and when it ended, our father started up the car and we drove to Grandma and Grandpa's in the village. We no longer went on vacations together; it was shameful for such grown-up girls (not to mention those with conjoined heads) to go on a vacation with their parents. Our cousins Verče and Lenče came with us, but their mother and father had to go by bus. Our grandmother was happy the whole time, and kept repeating, “Lawyers, lawyers. Now we'll have people to defend us, too.” Grandfather added, “from flies.” Srebra laughed loudly and said, “You'll see, Grandpa, you'll see. We will put that Slavica in jail, you'll see,” which made Grandpa angry; he got up and left the room, saying, “Both you and Slavica can just go to hell.” I tried not to think about the fact that I was going to study in the Law Department. I wanted to spend the summer before university as wonderfully as possible, if, that is, it was possible with our conjoined heads. While our grandfather, father, and uncle, and sometimes our younger uncle (that is, when he was allowed to by his wife, who did not like anything or anyone—and we didn't like her either) went into the field to work, reaping and baling the hay, and doing all sorts of other things, the women, sitting on the floor in the large passageway called an “earth cellar” because it had a dirt floor, would string tobacco leaves. Leaning against the walls, dressed in
old clothes and woolen vests because even in the summer it was as cold as a refrigerator in the cellar, we threaded the tobacco, talked, and drank coffee, our mother and aunt reading the grounds in our coffee cups. We gossiped, and sometimes laughed. Everything was easier when our aunt and grandmother were present, because Srebra and I felt that they loved us, and that our aunt Ivanka didn't differentiate us from our other cousins. Leaning our heads against the cold wall, Srebra and I often got our needles and thread tangled, and tore some of the leaves, and our mother would say, “Just leave it alone; you're not fit for stringing tobacco. You're going to tear all the leaves.” But our grandmother would say that it wasn't our fault that our threads got intertwined and that it was nothing too serious; the tobacco wasn't worth much anyway, there wasn't hardly any point in stringing it, the work caused us nothing but trouble, and in the end, it wouldn't bring enough money for medicine, let alone bread. One day, while we were stringing the tobacco, our aunt said to Grandma, “Verče hasn't had her period this month. I'll bet she was out among the hazel trees. Just you wait. She might be pregnant.” Verče was at the store at that moment. We had sent her to buy some bottles of Strumka so we could slake our thirst a bit. Twelve-year-old Lenče asked, “Can a woman get pregnant by walking through the hazel wood?” And right away, I could imagine the scene in Lenče's head—she had serious psychological problems diagnosed as manic depression, and sometimes, without knowing why, she would beat her mother until she drew blood and afterward wouldn't remember it—Verče walks on and on, passing the clearing, then climbing up the hill on the right side of the road to reach the hazelnut forest. She sits under the lowest tree, tears off some hazelnuts, breaking some with a stone, some with her foot, and others with her teeth. She crunches them with relish until all the spaces between her teeth are filled with ground bits of hazelnut, and when she feels there is no way to eat even one more kernel, she fills her pockets, for the others—that is, for us. She stands up, her belly heavy, pregnant, and drags herself to Grandma's house in the village. She gives us the hazelnuts so we can also become pregnant, and she waits for her baby and ours to be born from the hazelnut pregnancies. But
no one answers Lenče. No one thinks she needs to know about such things. When Lenče was born, she was completely normal, a sweet girl who developed like any other kid. In first grade, they even enrolled her in the folk-dance group at the Pioneers' Club. How she liked to dance! She learned the dances faster than anyone, even the most difficult ones. We always asked her to dance for us when she came to visit, and she would twirl around the dining room with our mother, who also knew all the dances, while Srebra and I watched, laughing, carried away by a warm pleasure, by some measure of closeness. Lenče took the bus with two older girls to the folk-dance group for three years, and as long as she didn't have to pay for the bus, everything was fine. But when she was in the third grade, the city bus drivers warned her that she, too, would have to start paying the fare. Lenče told her father, and he decided to pull her from the program. After she was withdrawn (
Extravagances
! How her father loved that word; now the bus fare has to be paid and the price of membership has gone up!) Lenče fell into a depression and suffered nervous breakdowns that consisted of hitting (especially Aunt Ivanka), screeching, falling into a trance, and later of missing her periods, not eating, visiting doctors, taking medicines, and finally, the consequences of such events on such a young organism: curvature of the spine, difficulty walking, weakening vision, abrupt weight fluctuations, and nervous crises in which she lost herself completely and had to be taken to the hospital, where first in the children's clinic and later in the adult psychiatric ward, she refused to eat, bathe, or allow anyone to visit her. She swayed like a branch in the hallways in an indescribable languor and sense of hopelessness. Nothing helped her, and Lenče never danced a single dance again. Her mother, fearing her younger daughter's violence, became increasingly possessive of her, and began to control her, to rule over her in every possible way: what she ate, how she dressed, where she went, what she did, when she bathed, how she combed her hair.